Microsoft today pledged to bring Xbox 360 programming to the masses, but ordinary folk will have to wait until the end of this month to get their hands on the tools they'll need to get coding for the console. Professionals will get a version in Spring 2007, the software giant said.

It seems increasingly likely that Vodafone Germany's wireline unit, Arcor, is no longer up for sale but will instead be incorporated into the giant cellco's first major experiment with fixed mobile convergence (FMC) - one that could be a blueprint for other territories.

Handset maker HTC is preparing the successor to 'Galaxy', the company's PDA phone with a built-in GPS receiver. The new model, dubbed 'Artemis', improves on the older device with a slicker look, a quad-band, EDGE-capable cellular radio and a two megapixel digicam.

With tech-tastes turning to everything retro, and ye olde analogue mobile phone brick-like handsets commanding high prices on eBay, how about going back more than a decade or two for the acme of old-style telephony: the rotary dial.

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has gathered in Prague to finally settle a matter of galactic import: whether Pluto is in fact a planet or should be relegated to the second division of Kuiper Belt Objects and similar detritus.

Aficionados of tenuous acronyms - in which great effort has been expended in forming a real word, often at the expense of linguistic common decency (try Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001, for example) - will certainly want to raise their glasses to Professor Axel Temming of the University of Hamburg who has pushed back the envelope with his spendid BECAUSE effort:

An eagle-eyed Wal-Mart clerk in Caro, Michigan may have foiled a dastardly terrorist plot simply by alerting police to a suspicious purchase made by three men of Middle-Eastern descent, the Associated Press reports.

It's been more than three years since the UK got its first 3G mobile phone network but a little less than two years since cellco Vodafone allowed its customers access to the technology. It's not hard to see why it waited: the early hype about mobile broadband quickly proved unjustified. But a last we're coming to the end of a year-long programme of metropolitan base-station updates bringing High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA), and there's a chance that the promise of 3G will be realised...

Mouse maker Logitech has hopped on the VoIP bandwagon with a phone-style cordless handset capable of connecting to its host computer from almost anywhere in the house. It's got a colour display and it's set to work with Skype. The company also unveiled today a PC-connected speakerphone and a Bluetooth headset for phones.

A US federal appeals court has rejected the claim of a Montana man who used his work computer to access child pornography that a probe of his machine breached his Fourth Amendment rights against "unreasonable searches and seizures", Reuters reports.

Demand for GPS devices continues unabated, market watcher Canalys has claimed. Its latest figures show more European consumers splashed out on handheld navigation gadgets in Q2 2006 than they did in Q4 2005, last year's Christmas quarter.

Dell's customer satisfaction flameout has started to reach record levels. The company today issued a recall for 4.1m laptop batteries out of fear that they could catch fire. The product recall stands as the largest ever for the US consumer electronics industry.